Hand-Crafted Sauerkraut That Heals

If you spend an hour with Nadia Ernestus, you will learn that sauerkraut is more than the base for choucroute garnie or something you put on a hot dog. Ms. Ernestus is the force behind Hamptons Brine, the producer of three kinds of raw sauerkraut and two versions of kvass, or sauerkraut juice.

Ms. Ernestus, a Sag Harbor resident who came to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1981, traces the beginning of her interest in fermented foods to a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes. “I wasn’t overweight, and the doctors didn’t offer anything but drugs,” she said.

Having cooked all her life, she made vegetables and fiber the mainstays of her diet and regained her health. When her youngest child left home three years ago, she enrolled in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition’s health coach training program, a yearlong online course in the healing properties of food.

“We learned about 102 different dietetic theories,” Ms. Ernestus said. When she graduated, she began running workshops with programs provided by the school. “I discovered that when I was in front of 40 people I loved it.”

She conducts regular workshops at the Hayground School in Bridgehampton and has given classes at other East End locations as well as Up­Island. Not long after she started teaching fermentation and making sauerkraut and kombucha, local stores contacted her with requests to carry her products.

Peter Garnham, a writer and chairman of the EECO Farm in East Hampton, told her she would need a food handler’s certificate if she wanted to sell her sauerkraut commercially. That led her to the Calverton Business Incubator, a part of Stony Brook University, where she was able to take the required course.

“The incubator is an amazing facility,” she said. “Its goal is to help all kinds of businesses to grow, not just food service, by removing the financial cost of infrastructure.” The incubator’s food-production facility is a state-of-the-art, 8,400-square-foot kitchen shared by people unable to afford their own professional kitchens.

Every step of production, from chopping the cabbage to putting it in jars to applying the labels to preparing it for shipment, is done by hand by Ms. Ernestus, with help from five part-time assistants. The cabbage, all of it organic, is grown in different locations, most of them in New York State. Ms. Ernestus even designed the company’s website and online store, with help from GoDaddy’s website-building tools.

Keeping up with the demand is daunting. During the past summer, she sold her products at three farmers markets, leaving her little time to travel to Calverton. “I was out of product all the time.” At the moment, she isn’t producing enough to sell to local stores. She makes four times as much money online as selling wholesale, but hopes eventually to be able to do both.

The production process is simple. Her “classic” sauerkraut consists of organic green cabbage, organic carrots, sea salt, Himalayan salt, and water. The first stage is to mix cabbage with salt. This kills many of the pathogens but doesn’t kill the lactobacillus. “They like the salt,” she laughed, referring to the “friendly” bacteria that live in our digestive systems without causing disease. The bacteria begin to digest the sugar from the cabbage, creating a byproduct of lactic acid, which makes the cabbage sour. The more salt, the more sour.

Canned, pasteurized, or cooked sauer­kraut doesn’t have the same benefits, because extended exposure to high heat kills the probiotic microorganisms. “Raw sauerkraut has 200 times as much vitamin C as cabbage,” according to Ms. Ernestus. “When something becomes bioavailable, the body can capture nutrition from it.” Heat treatment of raw cabbage is unnecessary because it is still alive. “It contains live bacteria. If you leave a bottle in a hot car it will explode.”

There is no question as to the product’s vitality. A bottle of her spicy kraut was bubbling when opened.

Eating raw sauerkraut on a regular basis, said Ms. Ernestus, can benefit the immune system, lower LDL cholesterol, assist in managing Type 2 diabetes, improve digestive function, and decrease allergies. A number of scientific studies, including one published in the journal Nutrition Cancer two years ago, have found that consumption of cabbage and sauerkraut is connected with significant reduction of breast cancer incidences.

The word “artisanal” is applied today to a vast range of products. In the magazine Inc., which targets owners of small businesses, the writer Tim Donnelly asked, “With  Tostitos, Dominos, and Sargento adopting the adjective, what’s a genuine hand-crafter to do?”

You can’t get much more hand-crafted than Hamptons Brine. And the weight of evidence says it’s good for you. Ms. Ernestus’s sauerkraut and kvass can be ordered at hamptonsbrine.com.